Jim Saksa | True or False: Penn girls are, on average, ugly

The guys here at Penn are excellent cry babies, ready to pout at any given moment. "The dining hall food stinks; I didn't get an A," they cry. "The elevators are slow; I miss my maid; the great unwashed frighten me; boo-hoo."

But there's one particular complaint I hear over and over again: The girls here are revolting.

"Penn girls are ugly," has been an incessant refrain in the symphony of bitching performed nightly by the boys at Penn. While I suspected this specific complaint was only the byproduct of sexual frustration, I thought it deserved investigation.

College Prowler, the "college guide written for students by students," gave the ladies here a C+. Not exactly the As they're used to receiving and considering they gave our athletics an A-, I had my doubts about CP's accuracy.

So I put my rigorous Ivy League education in social science to work and found the guys here guilty of perpetuating a false stereotype. The only thing ugly about our girls is the slander they suffer.

I rounded up some friends and visited Villanova, Bryn Mawr and Drexel. We rated the girls at random on a 1-10 scale and compared the results with our own lady Quakers. Afterwards, I calculated the mean, median and mode of each school. I did not calculate significance or confidence levels because I have no freaking clue how.

The results: Penn girls are spectacularly average. At the four schools, we found a combined average rating of 4.22. Penn ranked second of the four (4.26) which compared favorably with Drexel (3.92) and very favorably with Bryn Mawr (3.06). Villanova, meanwhile, dominated the group with an average score of 5.08. The medians reflected the means, and so did the modes.

The results were a bit lower than expected, probably because we went out on a cold November weekend and observed many girls in sweats. As "researcher" and Engineering sophomore Barzin Nabet put it, "If we went out on Halloween and scoped out the furry, scantily clad girls I'm sure the ratings would be much higher."

Why he is attracted to furry girls, I don't know. Frankly, I'm a bit worried.

So, from what I could tell, Penn girls deserve a better reputation. Kinda like New Jersey (we export OUR garbage to you assholes, so screw you N.Y. and Pa.).

Penn guys have unfairly maligned our female counterparts for far too long, and the girls know it. "You guys are all assholes," said Nursing senior Kathleen Downes, "including you, Jim." She's right, we are all assholes.

"Don't give Penn girls such a hard time," she added. "You guys aren't that hot . including you, Jim."

Even the guys who rated the girls agreed that we've been wrong. "I always thought that Penn girls weren't the best, but when we did our survey work and then came back to Penn, I think my eyes opened up a little," said one. "Penn girls really aren't that bad at all."

Men, by and large, are shallow pigs. His isn't just a common sentiment among recent divorcees. It's scientific fact. Ray Fisman, a professor at Columbia Business School, created a speed-dating experiment to determine how we pick partners. "We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did," Fisman wrote recently on Slate.

"We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks from research assistants."

Social science at its finest.

But that's not all. Not only are guys superficial, we're also pretty damn insecure. "It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves," Fisman wrote. "The same held true for measures of career ambition - a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date."

Penn guys might complain about looks, but it's really the future earning potential that has their panties in a bunch.

But girls aren't perfect either. Fisman's study found that women judged men more on intelligence and ambition than looks. Men might be shallow, but at least we're not all gold diggers.

In fact, more than looks, my research assistants bemoaned the personalities of their female peers. "I find that I don't even shoot for the most attractive girls here at Penn," said College sophomore Ben Skarzynski, "because most of them would just give cold shoulders and are bitches anyway."

Personally, I think the girls here can be a bit haughty too. But, then again, I'm an asshole. Instead of focusing on the opposite sex's shortcomings, maybe it's time for all of us to examine our own.

Jim Saksa is a College senior from Toms River, N.J. His e-mail address is saksa@dailypennsylvanian.com. You, Sir, are an Idiot appears on Tuesdays.

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